Flying Sauce Attack

Don’t love my baby for her pouting lips
Don’t love my baby for her curvy hips
I love my baby ‘cos she does good sculptures, yeah

Ever wondered what would happen if you fed 5 kids half a ton of bright blue and red sweeties washed down with fizzy pop for a month and then let them loose in a paint factory? then wonder no more, just spin the Rezillos Can’t Stand The Rezillos.  This is just such a wonderful jolting day-glo splash of FUN it should be available free on the NHS to blast aside that S.A.D.

I love this wee Scottish beastie* from the planet 1978.  As an avid collector of fast immature stuff this pretty much has pride of place up there with fellow Sire Records acts the Ramones and the Undertones for me, having a female co-vocalist on the Lp really gives the Rezillos a different point of (flying saucer) attack too.  I have to say I’m not sure I have a more bass guitar driven LP than this one in the 1537 archives,  Mysterious** leads almost every single track on Can’t Stand The Rezillos careering off at a ludicrous pace.  Just cue up opener ‘Flying Saucer Attack’ if you don’t believe me and just surf that sugar rush.  I love the clip from Top of the Pops, Fay Fife does overly expressive hand gestures and strange jerky dancing that happily reminds me of that noblest creation of divine Providence, me:

I also rather dig the groovy B-52s-esque lyrics, the Rezillos don’t need them, but they get 1537 bonus points for the couplet,

Watch the skies above the horizon
For the spies who have no flies on

Certain Nobel laureates I could mention have been fart-arsing about since 1974 without coming anywhere near that level of genius.  True story.

But where was I?  oh yes, it’s all damned good but the most notable blasts here include the wonderful, deeply sarcastic ‘Top Of The Pops’, which in addition to a truly great tune, saw the band perform the track on the titular show^, with even more jerky dancing and 1537-like hand gestures.  I’m also totally smitten by their ferocious cover of ‘Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked in Tonight’, where they boil one of my very favourite Mac tracks into a 1:54 burst – imagine a totally malignant Banana Splits and you’re almost there, Eugene Reynolds excels on this baby – as he does on ‘No’, sounding like Jake Burns.

The Rezillos were an art school mob and they seem to have snuck the fact that they could really play well past their contemporaries, guitarist Jo Callis went on to play with the Human League in their prime.  I’m not very objective where they are concerned and just lap up their whole cartoon-y, paint spatter, space schtick, wholesale.  Much as I dig their over-caffeinated cover of the Dave Clarke Five’s ‘Glad All Over’, where Fife’s accent pokes through, my real fave is, appropriately for this mob, ‘(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures’.  It’s a really great breakneck track again, with lyrics that make me smirk and go ‘awww’ because it comes over as knowingly romantic too:

She don’t care for one night stands
And naughty boys with sweaty hands
She got a thing about carving wood
Or shaping a figure from a lump of mud

There isn’t too much more to write about Can’t Stand The Rezillos, I love it because I want something to blast away my commuting-in-the-dark blues and make me thrill to a hyper speed go-go sci-fi beat and like all my favourite bands they don’t take themselves very seriously.  Surely after a year like 2016, there has to be a place to slap on an album like this and mindlessly pogo until your calves hurt too much to go on, or until you headbutt the light fitting one too many times?

Laser beams and gamma projectors
There’ll be nothing on earth to protect us!

722 Down.

*I speaka di lingo, effortlessly, ye ken?  Wee beastie this may be, but it sure as shit ain’t a cowerin’ timorous one.

**yes, that’s his name.  1978 was a foreign country; they do things differently there.

^I get a bit giggly typing the word ‘titular’, is that normal?